1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to integrated circuit fabrication and, more particularly, to a method for fabricating an integrated circuit that includes a transistor with low-resistivity junctions (i.e., source/drain structures) at least partially recessed within a dielectric base layer, and to an integrated circuit capable of being manufactured by such a method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advances in computer technology, among other factors, result in a continual demand for faster integrated circuits. Integrated circuit speed may be limited by various factors, such as circuit architecture, interconnection delays, and speed limitations of individual transistors. Such transistor speed limitations may often be described in terms of RC time constants, where R and C are the resistance and capacitance, respectively, associated with the transistor structure. RC time constants characterize the time needed for a transistor to turn on or off, so that transistor speed may be increased by making RC time constants as low as possible. Two types of resistance commonly associated with transistor structures are series resistance and contact resistance. Series resistance is the resistance encountered by carriers traveling within a given portion of the transistor, such as the source of a MOSFET. Contact resistance is the resistance associated with a contact to the transistor region.
Both series and contact resistance are associated with source, drain, and gate regions of MOS transistors. Series resistance is related to the resistivity of the doped silicon typically used for source, drain and gate regions, while contact resistance is related to the resistance of the junction formed between such a silicon source, drain or gate region and an interconnect, which is typically formed from metal. A partial cross-sectional view of a conventional MOSFET structure is shown in FIG. 1. Gate dielectric 102 and polysilicon gate conductor 104 are formed upon silicon substrate 100 by deposition and patterning of dielectric and polysilicon layers. Source 106 and drain 108 are of an opposite carrier type than substrate 100. No patterning step is needed for introduction of source 106 and drain 108, since these impurity distributions are typically introduced after formation of gate conductor 104. Gate conductor 104 serves as a mask to exclude the dopants forming source 106 and drain 108 from the transistor channel underlying gate dielectric 102. Because photolithography and the associated alignment process is not used in forming source 106 and drain 108, the source and drain are said to be "self-aligned" to the gate. The transistor and the fabrication method used to form it are also often described as self-aligned.
Self-aligned source/drain regions such as regions 106 and 108 in FIG. 1 exhibit minimal overlap with the transistor gate, minimizing the parasitic capacitances that can increase RC time constants and limit high-frequency transistor performance. In addition, the self-alignment process allows smaller feature sizes to be used, because the size tolerances that must be left to allow for lithographic alignment error are not needed. The use of conventional self-aligned processes does impose limitations upon transistor fabrication, however. For example, the use of impurity regions in the semiconductor substrate to form the source and drain necessitates high-temperature (greater than about 900.degree. C.) processing to activate impurities and anneal substrate damage, if the source and drain impurities are introduced by ion implantation (as is generally the case). Alternative impurity introduction methods such as diffusion also involve high-temperature processes.
The choice of gate materials is therefore limited, because the gate must be able to withstand the high-temperature source/drain processing. Metals such as aluminum, which might otherwise be attractive because of their low resistivity, are not able to withstand such high temperatures. In part for this reason, the current material of choice for gate conductors in MOSFET fabrication is polycrystalline silicon, or polysilicon. The resistivity of a polysilicon gate conductor is typically lowered by doping, which is often performed by ion implantation, using the same implants that dope the self-aligned source and drain.
Problems can arise with this doping, however, in part because of the different rates of dopant diffusion in polysilicon as opposed to single-crystal silicon. Although typical gate conductor thicknesses are greater than the depths of the shallow junctions required for source and drain regions in high-performance devices, diffusion rates along the grain boundaries of polycrystalline films can be on the order of one hundred times as fast as in single-crystal silicon. This can allow dopants in a polysilicon gate conductor to diffuse across the thin gate dielectric and into the underlying channel region during high-temperature processes such as implant anneals. Such diffusion can leave a region of low carrier concentration in the polysilicon directly above the gate dielectric, an occurrence often called the "polysilicon depletion effect". This region of the gate conductor adjacent to the gate dielectric therefore has a higher resistivity, and the resulting device performs as if it had an increased gate dielectric thickness. Effective doping of polysilicon gate regions is further complicated in CMOS devices because of differences in the diffusion behavior of boron, the typical p-channel transistor dopant, and arsenic, the typical n-channel transistor dopant. Boron diffuses more rapidly in polysilicon than arsenic, which tends to segregate at grain boundaries. Adequate activation of arsenic impurities throughout the gate conductor of an n-channel device without causing excessive boron diffusion and polysilicon depletion effects in a p-channel device presents significant challenges.
It would therefore be desirable to design a method for fabricating a transistor that did not require dopant implantation into a silicon substrate and the associated high-temperature processing. The desired method should also provide for the formation of low-resistivity source/drain regions and low-resistivity contacts to the source/drain regions and the gate conductor. A transistor formed in such a manner could have lower series and contact resistances than conventionally formed transistors.